11:11 Angels Message Board

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee: Sounds Wild and Broken is a remarkably comprehensive book exploring the history and evolution of sound, the relationships embedded within sound, and the threat to much of the living world’s sonic diversity and experience due to the mass extinction of sound-generating species. What led you to want to explore sound in such a deep and profound way?

David G. Haskell: Well, my ears, and the birds that tickled my ears. Birds really were the gateway drug, as it were, to deeper listening. I came from a family where attention to the living world was part of how we operated—my parents taught me how to identify some bird sounds—but when I went to grad school and came over from Europe to North America, I met people who devoted a good chunk of their lives to studying birds and the sounds of birds at Cornell University, and they taught me all sorts of cool ideas and technologies. But mostly the gift was to go outside and just pay attention in the everyday, to learn to identify species, and individuals within species, and then hear the thousands of different nuances of night and day and of spring and summer: all of the variegations of the world revealed through the remarkable sonic diversity of birds. It was like adding a new sense to my body. It wasn’t just enhanced hearing; it was as if I’d suddenly been connected into the living Earth in a way that I hadn’t known before.